Many reusable and recyclable materials such as glass, plastic, metals, papers, cardboards and organic matter such as food are currently disposed of by the domestic householder or a commercial business collecting in bags or bins which are collected by the local authority and subsequently either incinerated and/or used in landfill sites and/or dump sites. Such methods of disposal are not only wasteful of many recyclable and reusable resources but also cause pollution to the environment.
For many householders and commercial businesses it is common practice now to separate out the various different forms of material that can be recycled and to collect them in individual containers which can then be uplifted by the local authority or other refuse collection organisations for recycling purposes. Accordingly it is now customary for householders and indeed restaurants and shops to have separate containers for paper, for cardboard, for glass (including different colours of glass), for plastics, and for organic waste material, typically waste food products.
A particular disadvantage of having a plurality of different containers is that they can take up valuable space in a kitchen or commercial premises particularly as such waste materials can take up a lot of space unless they are compacted or otherwise processed.
In our European Patent No. 0469122B (Application No. 91904618.5) of 19 Feb. 1991 we describe and disclose a domestic waste processor suitable for addressing one or more of the above-described disadvantages of recycling domestic and commercial waste. Since then there have been further patent applications directed to apparatus for handling waste materials including inter alia, GB2447612; PCT/IB2007/003511 & PCT/EP2007/005793.
One of the problems associated with processing and compacting domestic and commercial waste for recycling is that different types of material would require different types of compaction means due to the different types of physical properties of the materials e.g. the differences between plastics, glass, aluminium cans and other waste material.
In our above noted European Patent No. 0469122B we describe a waste processor which has a plurality of inlet means connected to respective collection zones and having compaction means formed and arranged for effective compaction of at least one of the plurality of different types of waste passing through the passage means. In practice this requires different compaction means and associated drive means and control means resulting in an appliance that is technically complex and very expensive to produce thus rendering such appliances unsuitable and too expensive for domestic use.
It is an object of the present invention to avoid or minimise one or more of the above disadvantages.